Sexual Advances

In her previous books, “Stiff” and a follow-up, “Spook,” Mary Roach set out to make creepy topics (cadavers, the afterlife) fun. In “Bonk,” she turns to sex, covering such territory as dried animal excreta used as vaginal “drying agents”; a rat’s tail “lost” in a penis; and a man named William Harvey, patent-holder for a rolling toaster-size metal box outfitted with a motorized “resiliently pliable artificial penis.” In short, she takes an entertaining topic and showcases its creepier side.

And then she makes the creepy funny. Intended as much for amusement as for enlightenment, “Bonk” is Roach’s foray into the world of sex research, mostly from Alfred Kinsey onward, but occasionally harking back to the ancient Greeks and medievals (equally unenlightened). Roach belongs to a particular strain of science writer; she’s interested less in scientific subjects than in the ways scientists study their subjects — less, in this case, in sex per se than in the laboratory dissection of sex. She delights in medical euphemism and scholarly jargon; you can hear her titter as she rolls out terms like “vaginal photoplethysmograph probe,” “nocturnal penile tumescence monitoring” and “vaginocavernosus reflex.” Writing about a 1950s-era study of vaginal response in which female subjects copulated with a penis camera, Roach wants to know how exactly the “dildo-camera” operated, who volunteered to make use of it in a laboratory setting and, above all, where the device is now. This is “as good as science gets,” she writes, “a mildly outrageous, terrifically courageous, seemingly efficacious display of creative problem-solving, fueled by a bullheaded dedication to amassing facts and dispelling myths in a long-neglected area of human physiology.”

In a similar spirit, there’s the study on “labial traction as an instigator of female orgasm,” conducted by a team of Colombian researchers in the mid-1980s. Heli Alzate, a physician and professor of sexology, and Mari Ladi Londoño, a psychotherapist, mustered 16 prostitutes and 32 feminists into their lab, where they manually stimulated their vaginal walls. The results? More than three-fourths of the prostitutes had an orgasm, compared with only one in eight feminists. While antifeminists will probably have a field day with these results, the intent wasn’t to measure frigidity according to political stance, but to determine whether penile thrusting alone was an efficient way of inducing female orgasm. (It’s not.)

A bold, tenacious and insatiable reporter, Roach combs through journal articles and books with lurid titles like “Urological Oddities,” “Vacuum Cleaner Use in Autoerotic Death” and “Curious Experiences With the Genital Organs of the Male,” a 1909 paper written by the resident obstetrician to a Turkish harem. She visits a Danish pig farm to observe a Five-Point Stimulation Plan intended to enhance sow pleasure during artificial insemination and observes Dr. Geng-Long Hsu, director of the Microsurgical Potency Reconstruction and Research Center in Taipei, at work in his operating room. Though the book has its share of alarming factoids — care to test-drive a “syngina,” anyone? — the scene over which Dr. Hsu presides is out-and-out harrowing. (Sensitive male readers may wish to stop reading here.) Roach small-talks with the good doctor as he digs in with a scalpel to perform something called the “inside-out maneuver” on the penis of a 47-year-old man.

You might think witnessing such procedures would give Roach pause. But she is not merely fond, as she puts it, of the “wanton use of first person” — she throws herself into the story. When Jing Deng, a senior lecturer in medical physics at University College London Medical School, mentions in a paper on 4-D ultrasound of male genitals that he hopes to one day capture a real-time image of human intercourse, Roach asks permission to watch the first scan. She is told that if her “organization” could provide the brave couple, Deng would be happy to oblige. “My organization gave some thought to this,” she writes. Ever frisky, Roach and her spectacularly gracious husband, Ed, are soon bound for London, where they will perform coitus inside a hospital room while Deng maneuvers an ultrasound wand over their significant body parts, pausing only to reboot his computer.

Still, Roach is sometimes stymied. Virginia Johnson of Masters and Johnson refused all interview requests; Scott, Johnson’s son and spokesman, turns Roach away with a curt: “We’re really not interested in getting involved. Follow?” Perhaps understandable. Roach has a knack for posing the embarrassing, nonlinear and too obvious questions that others are always afraid to ask. When she quizzes an infertility specialist about whether female orgasm increases the chances of conception, he sighs and says: “I think by now you know how science is. ... I know a lot about artificial insemination, but I have no idea about the answer to your very simple question.” One of the serious, and most disturbing, themes of “Bonk” is the difficulty of conducting sex research in an era of corporatized and politicized medical science. If the study of female sexual pleasure doesn’t lead pointedly in the direction of a she-Viagra, chances are it won’t get studied. One senses the clock ticking on Dr. Ahmed Shafik, a Cairo-based sexologist who studies sexual reflexes, often on the sly. He is, his office manager tells Roach, a holdover from the 19th century, “when science was undertaken simply for the sake of understanding the world.”

In cases in which the medical community proves ill equipped to respond to her relentless queries, Roach gamely approaches the corporate world. To find out whether self-stimulation holds any medical benefits (answer: yes!), she pays a visit to Topco, a sex-toy manufacturer. A tour of the factory produces the unlikely sight of a man in blue smock and hairnet overloaded with chocolate-brown dildos, and teams of Latina factory workers carefully hand-staining dildo tips. “I asked a girl one day, ‘Do your parents know what you do?’ ” Topco’s chairman tells Roach. “She says, ‘No, I just tell them I work in plastics.’ ”

Perhaps it’s petty to criticize a writer for being too curious, but occasionally Roach’s enthusiasm runneth over. In a book best described as lightly organized, Roach’s promiscuous use of footnotes occasionally becomes distracting. Yes, learning how an erection can be compared to nasal congestion is interesting, but not in the middle of major penis surgery. Yes, it is possibly of interest that the name Dorcus was once trendy enough to bestow on a popular embroidery magazine, but need that interrupt a discussion of “rectal electroejaculators”? (Don’t get excited — they’re intended for livestock.) The marginalia also distract her from asking some basic questions, like, When did sex research shift from prudish to freewheeling to corporate-controlled? How did this happen, and why?

Finally, despite Roach’s great sense of humor, her smirkiness can sometimes get in her way. She could probably have lost the comparison of vaginal fistulas to the Three Tenors, and it may have been overspeculation to suspect that the male model in an instructional video on pelvic floor exercises is the author of a study on the subject. But these are quibbles over an otherwise greatly satisfying romp. And as a woman who could make an earthworm evisceration riveting and a hemispherectomy seem downright jolly, Roach can’t be faulted for having fun with sex. Even if purely for the purposes of research.

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